Simon: Possibly you do [have to take Draconian measures, not
afford terrorists the rights under Geneva Convention that
are granted to soldiers of other nations] but then why keep
it secret?
It's not really a secret, is it? Even before the "startling"
disclosures, I assumed something like that was happening.
I'm sure most people did. You could read about it before
9/11...the slang term for it was giving the terrorist "a
trip to the Pyramids," meaning rendition to Egypt.
So we have a choice of selecting with whom we primarily
identify. Do we identify with the terrorist being so
rendered? That's easy. Imagine you are falsely charged with
a terrorist connection, stripped of your rights, and sent to
some hell hole for waterboarding.
Do you take the other route and identify with thousands of
innocents who are spared from sudden death or lifelong
misery? The latter choice is harder because nebulous. It's
easy to imagine one individual going the Kafka route,
subject to the whims of a psychotic government. Most of us
have read _The Trial_.
However, the notion of scores of people living their lives
without being terror victims: for that we have no
existential literature. In the mind's eye, it just looks
like the status quo.
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